According to a report from the BBC, ICANN has plans to deregulate top level domain names to allow any string of letters to be used as a top level domain, paving the way for long proposed domains such as .xxx, for company names like .Disney or even personal names such as .gordonfinlayson to be used as a domain name.
The proposed system would also allow for internationalization of domain names so that additional new languages and characters could be used to register domains which will be a plus for the billions of people who don't use Latin alphabets.
ICANN will vote on the proposal on Thursday on the last day of a series of public meetings which are being held in Paris this week. ICANN acts as the guardian of all Internet domain names and more informally as a global regulator of the Internet, but such services don't come cheap and the new domain names could see the cash rolling in for ICANN.
The release of a new domain name system could see a feeding frenzy as people individuals and companies compete to acquire catchy or unique domain names, and will no doubt be a considerable disappointment to all the poor saps who have paid good money for quality .com, .net or .tv domain names. All this is is inevitably going to result in a ton of new disputes over precedence for registrations, trade marks and issues like obscenity so lets hope ICANN has a really good dispute resolution procedure in the works.
As the 2008 US presidential election campaign finally approaches full steam, presumtive nominees Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are facing off in the media to win hearts and minds. But which candidate is making the most of the of online social media services?
A visit to www.barackobama.com shows that the Obama campaign has established itself firmly in the social media world with an offical presence on major services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn and more specialist sites such as Glee, Eons, MyBatanga, AsianAve and Faithbase.
On the Republican side, John McCain's presidential campaign has developed its basic Web presence with a mult-faceted Web site but McCain lags far behind Obama in terms of presence and supporters in the key online social media battlegrounds.
Having an emotional moment but just can't seem to express yourself with words? Well send a TinySong and tell the World how you feel with music instead.
TinySong is a nifty new application from the folks at GrooveShark that allows you to search for a track on the GrooveShark database, then gives you a short link that you can cut and paste into into an email, instant message or add to a blog entry if you want to funk it up.
TinySong is the latest project from the folks at GrooveShark who have recently been aggressively marketing their service with dirt cheap music download offers such as their Mothers Day 49 cent download offer. TinySong links in to GrooveShark's' marketing efforts as it not only allows users to share songs, but also allows the TinySong recipient to purchase the track they are sent if they are getting into the groove.
The service has only had a soft launch, so you'll have to excuse any quirks, according to the good people at GrooveShark next steps include Twitter and Tumblr integration before a wider launch of the service.
The nearly unpronounceable but endlessly creative Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich turn their microscope towards the podcast with this excellent series from New York's WYNC. Tackling issues as diverse as Laughter, Sleep, Time and 'Who Am I?' these uber-geeks play on the fringes of radio documentary, journalism and sound art. Abumrad comes to the series with a pedigree that includes composing music for films and television and extensive radio documentary work while Krulwich comes to Radiolab as the much lauded Science Correspondent for the US National Public Radio network.
Radiolab takes on themes relating to science, nature or culture and examines them through a prism filtered by scientific method, social history, personal experience and sound production methods. Produced in series of 5 parts at a time, with its innovative subject matter, high quality production, creative writing and detailed research Radiolab is one of the most innovative podcasts available for download online.
Click here to subscribe to the Radio Lab RSS Feed.
Sonific, the Web based music distribution system that brought you SongSpots, is set to close on May 1. Sonific worked by allowing users to embed 'SongSpots' in Web sites, individual flash widgets that play individual songs on demand. The service targeted social media sites and bloggers who could augment their sites with tracks without additional software or servers.
In a statement on the Sonific Web site, founder Gerd Leonhard, said that the economics of the music industry made it impossible for Sonific to continue with its current business model. Leonhard pointed to the attitude of major labels as one of the key issues in developing the service, noting that the Majors would often make unreasonable demands to license their music, 'we have routinely faced demands for very large cash advances and fixed per-stream minimum payments, pressure to give them 'free' company equity, and requirements of utterly bizarre usage restrictions.'
According to Leonhard the site had around 80,000 registered users and had managed to aggregate over 200,000 songs from independent labels and music aggregators, but had found it difficult in the current business environment to carve out a realistic business model for the service.
According to Leonhard's statement 'the bottom line is that this industry is certifiably dysfunctional and that we do not see a plausible path to take at this time. We neither want to engage in so-called copyright infringement nor do we have millions of dollars available to buy our way in when it is abundantly clear that doing business under the existing rules of the major labels will simply amount to economic suicide.
P2P music community site Grooveshark has entered a new phase with the launch of Grooveshark Lite, a Web based application to allow community users to share and purchase tracks. Grooveshark differentiates itself from other music Webtailers by giving community members credits every time a fellow user purchases a track from their music library.
Grooveshark lite allows you to organize your music and build playlists or makes recommendations on top tracks from other users to build playlists if you can't be bothered to build your own. Grooveshark also lets you stream entire tracks from other users before you make your purchasing decisions.
The Web site is the latest incarnation of a service that launched in beta as a P2P application that maps your music library and then allows you to share it with fellow community users, as Download Squad wrote last year. Music that is then made available through Grooveshark can be purchased by other users, and community members are rewarded with credits each time purchases are made from their library.
Grooveshark is a radical new service that attempts to fuse community services and P2P music file sharing with a product that will motivate users to share music files and simultaneously accrue credits towards music purchases from the process. Subscribing to Grooveshark turns your own personal library of music into a music store available to family, friends and any other passing consumers that you can draw in. The service is an ambitious attempt to commercialize a P2P distribution distribution with social networking model of distribution.
Grooveshark requires the user to download a Java app that interfaces between the Web service and your library of tunes. The site operates like a music laundering service, no questions are asked as to where the tracks came from, but when one of your contacts chooses to download the track from your computer, Grooveshark will bill your contact for the full cost of the track and then pay a share of the money to the label and credit a portion to your account against future purchases.
Earlier this week I wrote about being banned from Facebook, wrongly accused of being a spammer. Needless to say there was in fact no justification for allegation, I managed to inadvertently triggered Facebook's anti-spam mechanisms by emailing a set of similar questions to a number of Facebook developers for an article I was writing.
Today Facebook gave me back my account but there wasn't the slightest bit of contrition in sight. In an email from customer service, they continued to assert that the emails that I sent to Facebook developers could still be seen as spam.
'Your account was disabled because you took repeated actions that could be construed as spam. For instance, it is a violation of Facebook's Terms of Use to repeatedly send the same message or to make the same post. Facebook prides itself in protecting users from spam, and we take this standard very seriously.'
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that Facebook takes action against spammers, but it would be nice if they acknowledged when the system had made a mistake. After all I wasted a considerable amount of time trying to research an article on Facebook development, time that was completely wasted since none of the developers would have been able to respond to my suspended account. Further, Facebook customer services even had the gall to suggest that if I violated the Facebook Terms further that they would terminate my account for good.
'Please do not send or post any more form messages. Further violations of our Terms will result in the termination of your account.'
The interest in my earlier article showed that my case was far from novel, numerous Download Squad readers commented with similar complaints and questions about Facebook's standards. For a site such as Facebook which is entrusted with the personal data of millions, this kind of arbitrary action raises questions about the management of that data. Recent questionable recruiting tactics from other social networking sites such as Quetchup has raised questions about privacy and management for other companies such as Facebook.
So thanks Facebook for giving me my account back, but no thanks for squandering any goodwill that I previously held for your social networking site.
On Saturday night Facebook took my life away, now I'm asking nicely, can I have it back please?
As a blogger for Download Squad I've followed the rise and rise of Facebook with fascination as the social networking site has expanded on the scale of an influenza pandemic. I watched with avid interest as my inbox was bombarded with Facebook friend requests from seemingly every part of my life and every corner of the globe.
Succumbing to the Facebook phenomenon, I was quickly drawn in by the combination of applications, messaging and of course the competitive instinct to rapidly gather a vast following of like minded friends who would be able to share with me the excitement of online photo albums, holiday maps, interest groups, online graffiti or the simple pleasures of turning fellow Facebookers into zombies, vampires or pirates (arrrr).
And then, on Saturday night I was framed for a crime I didn't commit, and now I'm on the run Richard Kimble style - trying to clear my name of one of the worst crimes that an Internet user could be accused of - being a spammer
While MySpace may have long cornered the attention of the music industry as far as social networking sites goes, with its phenomenal growth over recent months Facebook can no longer be ignored as a channel for music marketing and distribution. Recently English developers Pushhit turned their attention to Facebook as a music distribution channel with the launch of the MusicWall application (link requires Facebook login).
MusicWall is a Facebook application that allows for the streaming download of MP3 files, and the sharing of tracks with other Facebook users. After developing the application, the developers decided that it wasn't enough to have developed the delivery mechanism, they wanted a say in the music as well, and so OKCool Recordings was formed. Since launching the label and the Facebook application just a week ago , OKCool has been joined by Web savvy label SMtv Music and drum and bass artist DJ Krust and other labels are approaching Pushhit every day.
With MusicWall still boxfresh at only a week old, I spoke to Pushhit director Mark Panay about developing MusicWall, OKCool and developing for the world's fastest growing social networking site.
Download Squad: What is the background of Pushhit and the MusicWall?
Mark Panay: Ok-Cool.com was set up as a bit of fun where we can post silly stuff, things that we've learned and progress on our projects. We have a few projects on the go; we run a company called SimpleWeb ltd for which we've created a client/website management system with a funky online page editor for small businesses, this is our bread and butter and is coming along nicely since starting at the beginning of the year. We also have a longstanding project called pushhit - we created a prototype of this late last year, tested it in the wild with a handful of users and have now turned this into a company - pushhit ltd. We have just secured some angel funding to progress this further and Music Wall is the first released project under the pushhit banner. The pushhit ethos: social publishing and distribution, we've termed this Digital Gossip...
For Apple users who want to save money on phone calls after paying all that cash for their expensive PC - help is at hand from Skype with the release of 2.7 beta. The 2.7 beta is the latest version from Skype for Mac and follows the release of 2.6 in April.
According to a post on the official Skype blog, the new version will build on the advances made in 2.6 and makes a number of incremental advances. The advances include being able to import contacts from your Apple address book, new public chat management features, auto redial and an improved sound transfer.
Skype 2.7 beta for Mac can be downloaded here, just scroll down the page and click on the link.
MySpace might still be the unofficial online home for hopeful bands the world over - but Facebook is making inroads in the UK as Blake, a band formed on the site, has been chosen to sing the official song of the English World Cup Rugby Squad. Rugby is a sport popular in many countries of the world outside the USA and is like the NFL without the helmets, body armor or all those commercial breaks.
According to Brighton's The Argus, Blake formed four months ago after the four former choristers discovered their shared interest on Facebook and decided to put together a classical music boyband Blake attracted the attention of the English Rugby authorities after they were spotted on an breakfast television show and have been engaged to sing the official England Rugby anthem 'Swing Low'.
Following the lead of major label rival EMI, Universal Music is set to start offering DRM-free downloads through a variety of online retailers - but apparently not through iTunes. The New York Times has reported that Universal will be the second major label to try out DRM-free music, through a trial that will see its unencumbered tracks available through retailers such as Google Music, Wal-Mart, Real Networks and Amazon.
It's reported that Universal is saying that the DRM-free sales will be on a trial period up until the first quarter of 2008, however it is not clear if Universal will follow the lead of EMI and place the DRM-free downloads in the market at a higher price-point than its other DRM encumbered tracks.
The move also seems designed to continue to place pressure on Apple's in the ongoing dispute between Universal and Apple over royalties from iTunes and iPods. Back in June Universal told Apple that it wouldn't renew its agreement with iTunes to sell music through the online store for another year and would sell at will, allowing the major to potentially pull out of iTunes at any time. The DRM-free announcement seems designed to turn up the heat on Apple to reach a settlement on royalties.
The news is particularly good for Amazon who announced in April that it was going to launch a DRM-free record store, but with only EMI's DRM-free content to work with to date, the online mega-retailer was looking like it was going to enter the digital music space with a pretty mediocre offering. The news is also great for consumers, by leaving iTunes out of the loop for the minute, competitors to the dominant service may get a chance to catch up on a small piece of the market, thus increasing competition and hopefully providing more options for the digital music buying public.
The Russian Government may have finally closed long running music pirate AllOfMP3.com recently, but apparently you can't keep a good music pirate down and it would appear a number of sites have sprung up in its place. My favorite is the aptly named LegalSounds which, just like AllOfMP3 goes out of its way to tell you that it's 'legal' but of course the artists that they're selling will never see a cent.
The number of pirate sites seems to have spun out of control recently with link site http://hubpages.com/hub/russianmp3site listing no less than 18 sites from Russia and the Ukraine, all selling unlicensed mainstream commercial music at bargain basement prices.
LegalSounds sells tracks at 9c each, or about a buck for an entire album download. For billing the site uses the 'Assist' payment gateway and requires you to download and install its software on your computer to buy tracks (needless to say I didn't take the risk of testing out what the impact the installation of such software on my computer would be).
The Russian Government finally closed down AllOfMP3 in response to US threats that it would block Russia's entry to the World Trade Organization, but the amount of time that it took to take down AllOfMP3 and the continued existence of sites such as LegalSounds demonstrates the extremely limited commitment of the Russian government to actually tackle piracy issues.
Unlike file sharing software such as Napster, the Russian music pirates actually charge money for the tracks that they're selling, so it's a pretty clear that it's simply stealing, yet there seems to be few practical ways to have the sites shut without any desire on the part from the Russian authorities.
The rise and rise of blogging as an online phenomenon has relied heavily on the ability of social nature of blogs - as each blog links into one another or as larger blogs link to and report on stories breaking on smaller specialist blogs. But while linking and references may be the lifeblood of blogging, there's a submerged undercurrent of blogs and Web sites looking to get something for nothing, sailing the high seas of the Blogosphere with a view to plundering hard working Blogs for what they can in order to build up page views and Google page rankings.
We at the Download Squad noticed this recently when one of our readers not only decided to cut and paste one of our posts into their blog but, also linked to his blog from the comments section original Download Squad post. While we're flattered at the attention, and impressed at the initiative it was still a little rude. All of a sudden we realized that it had all the hallmarks of a Blog Pirate, a fly by night operation that swoops in, cutlasses blazing, to lift off a treasure trove of stolen blog posts to their Google adsense infested pirate lair Web site.
When we started to look into the phenomenon of Blog Piracy, it was like sailing through the blue waters of the Caribbean circa the 17th century - suddenly the Blog Pirates were absolutely everywhere. Googling recent posts from Download Squad likewise turns up a host of blog pirates, such as the so called Software Online Guide (which looks more like a homage site to Download Squad than an actual blog) these folks are cutting and pasting for fun and profit, but probably without that much of either.
Looking across the waves at our sister site Engadget, it didn't take very long at all to come up with a host of Blog Pirates that had ruthlessly plundered its wares. Take for example the recent story 'Microsoft envisions invasive approach to targeted advertising' the story was reproduced word for word plus images and 'file under' references on both http://news.techvine.org/ and http://www.blogjunkies.com/, the only thing that was missing was any mention of either Engadget, or Darren Murph – the guy that actually wrote the post to begin with.
Blog Piracy can take a number of forms: sites such as TopWebStuffs try to look like to have an RSS reader interface to transplant entire Download Squad articles onto their 'aggregation' site, except unlike an RSS reader, you only get what they give you, not what you subscribed to read. Other sites such as kods.net seem to be set up to plunder anything that comes through on an RSS feed.
Don't get us wrong, we're always keen to see our work being linked to or quoted, but m'hearties it would be fine to be sure to see some of those tharr golden links in exchange for all of our hard sailing.
A far reaching transformation of domain names could be in store as Internet guardians, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) meets to discuss changes to top level domain names. 
As the 2008 US presidential election campaign finally approaches full steam, presumtive nominees Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama are facing off in the media to win hearts and minds. But which candidate is making the most of the of online social media services?
While MySpace may have long cornered the attention of the music industry as far as social networking sites goes, with its phenomenal growth over recent months Facebook can no longer be ignored as a channel for music marketing and distribution. Recently English developers Pushhit turned their attention to Facebook as a music distribution channel with the launch of the 
For Apple users who want to save money on phone calls after paying all that cash for their expensive PC - help is at hand from Skype with the release of 2.7 beta. The 2.7 beta is the latest version from Skype for Mac and follows the release of 2.6 in April. 
MySpace might still be the unofficial online home for hopeful bands the world over - but Facebook is making inroads in the UK as Blake, a band formed on the site, has been chosen to sing the official song of the English World Cup Rugby Squad. Rugby is a sport popular in many countries of the world outside the USA and is like the NFL without the helmets, body armor or all those commercial breaks. 
Following the lead of 
The Russian Government may have finally closed long running music pirate AllOfMP3.com recently, but apparently you can't keep a good music pirate down and it would appear a number of sites have sprung up in its place. My favorite is the aptly named 
The rise and rise of blogging as an online phenomenon has relied heavily on the ability of social nature of blogs - as each blog links into one another or as larger blogs link to and report on stories breaking on smaller specialist blogs. But while linking and references may be the lifeblood of blogging, there's a submerged undercurrent of blogs and Web sites looking to get something for nothing, sailing the high seas of the Blogosphere with a view to plundering hard working Blogs for what they can in order to build up page views and Google page rankings. 
